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Muhammad Nazmy Zailani of Spectra Secondary School draws laughs as his group catches him during a trust fall. Usually carried out on the first day after ice-breakers, the activity makes the students, who have yet to get acquainted, trust each other as they fall onto a mat supported by their peers. The new MOE programme sees a minimum of two schools participating at a time.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Students pitch their tents next to the shore on Pulau Ubin on the first day. The programme requires participants to sleep outdoors on all four nights. Tent pitching and field cooking were taught during the pre-camp aspect of the new programme.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Jan Abigail Gardiola Tolentino (far right) and Natasha Aliyah Ismail of Spectra Secondary ascend the 20m-tall inverse tower in tandem, attached to each other by a strap, on day two. Students have to figure out how to climb the structure, where the distance between logs increases as they go higher.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Students eat from a common mess tin during dinner time. Participants are required to cook their own meals for most of the five days and have to ration their food supplies, which include noodles, canned food, bread, isotonic-drink powder sachets and an assortment of snacks.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Tired from half a day of rowing, students are briefed by their instructor before getting ready to spend the night on the cutter. This involved installing a tarp for shelter, and lining the base with ponchos in case water seeped in.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Noor Mohammad Faiz of Springfield Secondary School and Isabelle Brigitte Kirkwood of Nanyang Girls' High School work together to row the cutter under heavy rain. The crew collectively agreed that this leg of the journey was one of the highlights of the camp.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Under dark skies, students work together to row from Pulau Ubin to Changi Beach, taking turns to rest. To make the ride more fun, a pair of binoculars was used to spot their friends on other boats.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

As part of an OBS tradition, students take an early-morning swim around their cutter after sleeping on board overnight. They then row 9km to the People's Association Water-Venture Centre on Changi Beach, where they set up camp for the night.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Students cycle from Changi Beach to the OBS Reception Centre on the second last day. Without their cellphones but with a few of them armed with walkie-talkies, they had to depend on physical maps rather than GPS to find their way to the end point.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

Zhang Junfang of Nanyang Girls' High School hugs Natasha Aliyah Ismail of Spectra Secondary School after students presented each other with their certificates of participation on the last day.ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

MOE-OBS camp gives Sec 3 students a five-day taste of the outdoors where teamwork becomes second nature

Outward Bound Singapore (OBS) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having come a long way since its days as a sort of boot camp to prepare young men about to enlist in national service.

Today, this pioneering centre in outdoor education, which is now part of the National Youth Council (NYC), has one of the largest Outward Bound centres in the world on Pulau Ubin, and plans to build another campus on Coney Island.

The expansion is timely and in line with the Ministry of Education's (MOE's) plan to put more emphasis on holistic student development, outside of classroom learning.

MOE announced the National Outdoor Adventure Education Masterplan last year and shortly after that launched the MOE-OBS Outdoor Education Programme, under which every Secondary 3 student will experience a five-day expedition-based camp from 2020.

OBS camps have long been something of a teenage rite of passage, where 15-year-olds who may not be used to "roughing it out" get a taste of the great outdoors. More than 500,000 young people have emerged from the programmes with battle scar-like mosquito bites. Most can brag about answering calls of nature in the middle of the sea, with a handful even proud of the fact that they managed to survive without a cellphone for five days.

While students tend to bond naturally over hardships that become bragging rights, what really brings them closer are their shared tasks, as I saw for myself while following a group of 12 teenagers for five days back in May.

Having gone through a similar five-day programme with OBS some 14 years ago, this camp was not entirely unfamiliar. If anything, the adventure aspect was heightened.

Egos had to be put aside in order for missions to be completed, and as the group got to know each other better, teamwork became second nature. Participants could forget about being selfish when they not only had to share their living space, but also their food and water during expeditions.

It was also a good chance to find out one's strengths and weaknesses, and, to a certain extent, use them to the group's advantage. It could be someone's obsessive-compulsive nature which made ration division and housekeeping a breeze, or a natural climber who would help his buddy overcome his phobia of heights during a tandem climb on the famed 20m-high inverse tower.

Diversity is also a key component of the new MOE programme, with a minimum of two different schools taking part at the same time. Emphasis is placed on pre- and post-camp activities such as preparation and reflection, aimed at giving students a better understanding of how what they learnt at camp can be transferred to aspects of their lives.

By the end of this year, an estimated 7,000 Sec 3 students would have gone through the new programme. MOE plans to roll it out to all schools when the OBS campus on Coney Island is completed in 2020.

The Straits Times

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